Tag: Genesis 10

What an old-fashioned question! In a globalised world, hasn’t the concept of a nation become threadbare and obsolete? Among academics and the political class, the nation-state is seen as a fairly recent innovation and one whose purpose has already failed in modern history. They argue that nation-states emerged in the American and French revolutions, spread in the 19th and 20th centuries across Europe, especially after Versailles, and then spread to the developing world in the wake of empire. However, the nation-state has seen its place eroded by the growth of international institutions and multinational companies, the advance of international law and the spread of global communications. Nations have served only to fuel violent nationalism, so the argument goes, in which case we are better off sitting loose to our national identity and pooling our sovereignty for the sake of a wider peace.

This is the argument of the liberal secularist establishment. It is based on two false assumptions. First, that the nation-state began around 1780, and is an entirely secular concept. It is assumed that by ‘nation’ we mean simply a defined territory, with a citizenship that forms the ‘body politic’, that sovereignty is vested ultimately in the people, and that nationhood consists purely in terms of political power, economics and the workings of government. Second, it assumes that nations spawn nationalism and that the wretched wars of the twentieth century that tore Europe apart in two world wars are the inevitable result. I will try to show over several blog posts that both these assumptions are wrong, and that the biblical concept of nationhood is much, much older than the French revolution.

I wish to argue that there is a biblical concept of nationhood that is part of God’s creation order, that it is a much richer idea than the secular nation-state and not to be confused with it, and that nations are still part of God’s plan and (surprisingly) will be part of the New Creation. Understanding nationhood is essential, among other things, to understanding Christian mission. Continue reading “What is a nation?”→